Should We Care Whether Others Believe in God?

March 24, 2011

I gave a talk recently in which I stated that converting the religious to atheism or humanism should not be a major objective of secular organizations such as CFI. This assertion resulted in probing questions from some who maintained that I might be underestimating the importance of religious belief. I don’t think so. Let me explain why. (An editorial making some of the same points appears in the current (April/May) issue of
Free Inquiry.)

Why should we care whether others believe in a god or other supernatural beings? Because these beliefs are false? Yes, they are false, but most people, including humanists, have a large number of false beliefs. Mistaken beliefs do not typically trigger passionate, prolonged efforts to persuade the person holding the erroneous belief that s/he is incorrect. Think of all the false beliefs each of us has about history, physics, biology, and whether our hair is thinning.

So if we are concerned about false beliefs that the religious have about the supernatural, presumably it must be because of the significant harmful consequences that follow from holding such mistaken beliefs.

In the case of religious beliefs, there are three broad categories into which such harmful consequences could fit. One is the self-inflicted harm resulting from religious belief. Second, there is the harm resulting from efforts by the religious to force their beliefs on others. Finally, there is harmful conduct toward others (not connected to imposition of beliefs) inspired or motivated by religious doctrines and practices.

With respect to self-regarding harmful behavior, I do not see this as sufficient justification for intervention, except perhaps in the case of imminent serious harm, for example, a person who is about to commit suicide because s/he believes it is the only way to meet God. Sure, religion produces false hopes and wastes a person’s time, but so do other mistaken beliefs. If the only harmful consequences from religious belief were those affecting the believer, it would constitute unjustified paternalism to devote significant time and effort to persuade the religious to give up their beliefs. Atheists are not in the business of saving souls.

Of course, for many—but, importantly, not all—of the religious, their beliefs are not purely a personal matter. To the contrary, many of the religious actively seek to convert others. Moreover, they often seek to impose their beliefs by enlisting the support of the government. This support can range from laws prohibiting individuals from abandoning their religion or criticizing it (such as the laws forbidding apostasy and blasphemy in some Islamic countries) to laws that passively support religion by allowing religious symbols to be displayed on public property. Whatever form government support for religion takes, it is wrong. Everyone should be free to come to their own conclusions about the existence of the supernatural without compulsion, prodding, or oversight by the State.

But notice that although religious beliefs surely motivate some of the religious to use the government as a crutch for their beliefs, other individuals who are religious are staunch defenders of church-state separation. Indeed, in the United States, the individuals responsible for providing us with constitutional guarantees of religious freedom were probably all religious, to some degree. In other words, it’s possible for a person to be religious and also support a secular government. So if we are concerned about combating preferential treatment for religion, it’s not necessary to persuade the religious to become atheists; we only need to persuade most of them of the justice and advantages of secularism.

This brings us to the third category of harm, that is, harmful consequences to others flowing from religious doctrines. These harms typically result from attempts to shape laws and public policies to reflect religious beliefs. For example, in the United States, religiously motivated individuals provide much of the support for continuing the ban on same-sex marriage, restricting or eliminating access to abortion, prohibiting stem cell research, teaching creationism in public schools, promoting abstinence-only sex education, and so forth. In other countries, the pernicious influence of religion is even more evident, with religion providing the justification for the subordination of women, the suppression of nonreligious education, and the denial of personal freedom.

With respect to this category of harm, wouldn’t it be beneficial to persuade the religious to change their beliefs? The answer to this question is a heavily qualified “yes.” The answer is qualified because, especially in Western countries, there are many religious who do not seek to utilize religious dogmas as the basis for public policy (perhaps because there isn’t much room for dogma in their religious beliefs). Along with humanists, they believe that we should have a secular state and base public policy on secular concerns and empirical evidence.

It is not so much religious belief in and of itself that is of concern to us, but the mindset of all too many of the religious that their doctrines should be reflected in the laws and regulations that govern us all, and, furthermore that they need not provide any justification for their support for a particular public policy other than “God says so.” If we are to have a truly democratic society, we need most of the people to break free of this mindset.

For some, that may mean they must first stop believing in the supernatural, because their religion so pervades their thinking and their life that they cannot conceive of reasoning about ethics and policy matters in secular terms until they stop believing in spirits. Of course, these are precisely the religious individuals who are the most difficult to reason with, so the odds of persuading them that their religious beliefs are unfounded are low—but the probability is not zero.

To sum up: If religion were entirely a personal matter, the religious beliefs of others would be of little concern to us. What we are principally concerned with is support for secularism. We want a secular state, we want nonbelievers to be treated fairly and equally, and we want public policy to be free of religious influence. To achieve these objectives, it is not necessary to convert all, or even most, of the religious. We simply need to ensure that a sufficient number of individuals are committed to the principles of secularism. Granted, that might require persuading some religious to become nonreligious — because they would not accept secularism otherwise — but only relatively few.

Thomas Jefferson got it right when he wrote, “It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” The beliefs of the religious, however absurd they may be, should be a matter of concern only to the extent the religious are motivated by their beliefs to harm others.

Comments:

#51 Val Eisman (Guest) on Friday April 01, 2011 at 6:20am

@ Lindsay. I’m glad you wrote this column. It’s important as many secular humanists have incorrect and false assumptions about the world in the realm of politics which lead them to be inactive and get involved in the political arena on the larger issues of the day. Religious people and God believers that I know can and do believe in social justice and can be far more effective in the political arena fighting some of the horrendous political attacks that are happening today on human and worker rights in this country than the self-centered, smug and complacent aethist that I too often meet up with.

Lastly, the rightwing forces utilizing repressive religious doctrine in this country are organized as opposed to individual religious persons and they are acting as a political force. To concentrate on religious individuals rather than these rightwing forces or those funding rightwing Christians is a failed tactic and is really persecuting others for no good reason apart from the fact they are religious and have views that differ with ours in one area. Meanwhile, I have view that differ strongly from many purported secular humanists in a variety of areas that I have found out are not so humanist at all. Instead, they are class bound elitist and supporters of the military industrial complex in this country They only want to put aside their God beliefs, but not the rest of the values and indoctrination that they received in their rightwing churches while growing up. They still ant to be buddy buddy with their rightwing friends and merely want to reach others at a personal level rather than confront the full extent of the Christian Right religious agenda in this country and it’s widespread persecution not only of civil and human rights in this country, but of many other people in other countries abroad whose pollitical views they disagree with. I’m thinking in particularly of Pat Robertson and some of his horrid utterances.

But to correct some things you mentioned in your last post:

l. Blacks are not he only minority in America. Almost 50% of California is now nonwhite. And persecution against Mexicans and illegal immigrants is widespread.

2. Two Siks recently got murdered within the last month in the Elk Grove suburb of Sacramento Ca. Anti-Muslim sentiment is widespread and being whipped up by our own government in the FBI entrapment cases against persons of Muslim descent which is now happening in our country as a support for our imperialist wars of intervention for oil and domination and control of this resource abroad.

#52 Val Eisman (Guest) on Friday April 01, 2011 at 6:35am

@Paul. Well said. Aethists and secular humanist who think they can combat they huge evils of our society by merely debating evolution with religious folks are deluding themselves as the right-wing and corporate elite like the Koch brothers gallop on ahead with their political and economic agendas utilizing the Christian right political candidates as tools who they can politically fund in for their own agenda and purposes hence spreading in greater religious and political persecution int his country.

It is the passage of the United Citizens decision by the Supreme Court that declare corporations as persons that has enabled the wealthy elite to step in and fund many rightwing Christians for political office as long as they will serve as their own tools for overturning environmental laws, and ensuring government deregulation. If these same individuals stop abortion, and ban gay marriage, they have no problems with that.

Again, to focus in on religious individuals rather than on the political forces who use the Christian political right for a much wider political agenda which will hurt and harm all of us much more greatly, is to pursue a meaningless agenda which CFI is embarked on IMO with their silly committees for investigation of superstitutious beliefs and their silly campaign against Walmart while the Koch Brothers are working to overturn the EPA.

If secular humanist really wanted to make a difference IMO, they would be working with the new national organization and local committees to overtun the United Citizens decision. We need widespread recognition and involvement of all groups and organizations in order to form a broad-based national coalition which will provide the political pressure to overtun this pernicious Supreme Court ruling which has now cost us the loss of democratic, civil and widespread political rights.

For anyone who doubts the validity of this, just look at Gov. Walker in Wisconsin and the recent prounouncements of his administration that the State Judicial court of Wisconsin has no jurisdiction over the State Legislature because of separation of Church and State. If ever there was a misapplication and misrepresentation of this policy, this is it. The dangerous new governor Walker of Wisconsin financially backed in his election by the Koch Brothers to the tune of one donation of $68,000 alone and anothe one of around $50,000, is a poster child for the political effect of the United Citizens legal decision and what it represents politically, economically and socially for America.

Welcome to the onset of a new facist face and beginnings of a facist adminsitration which is tearing down the political and legal system in Wisconsin while aethists and secular humanists prattle about Darwinism.

I realize that you’re acknowledging that some religion is harmful, but you seem to be arguing that since some other religion isn’t obviously and patently harmful, we shouldn’t worry about the latter—-it’s not religion in general that’s bad, so we should resist bad religion but be okay with good religion.

I think that’s a little like saying that cigarettes don’t always cause cancer, and we shouldn’t wory about the ones that don’t; you’re making independence assumptions that aren’t true, because you’re work

That’s not really fair, though, I admit; I’ll try to do better.

I think it’s important to talk about religious ideas, rather than talking about religions as though they were the relevant units of analysis.

Basic religious ideas are rather like handguns. You can say that handguns kill people, and it’s true in the sense that they’re causally implicated in many deaths, and it’s not just a big coincidence.

Or you can say that handguns don’t kill people, people do, and that’s sorta true in a certain sense—-the involvement of a handgun is neither necessary or sufficient for killing someone.

To continue the analogy, you might say that handguns don’t kill people, but handguns loaded with bullets and in the wrong hands do kill people.

That is, (basic religious ideas like souls and god and morality being supernaturally inspired or revealed) often don’t cause big problems.

But if you combine those basic belief with easily available “bullets”—-specific and especially dangerous religious beliefs—-the risk factor goes way, way up. If you combine that guns-and-ammo combination to somebody ill-equipped to deal with it, say somebody who’s rather paranoid, or particularly mean, or whatever… then the risk goes way, way up.

The idea here is that basic religious beliefs, common to ALL popular religions, are a major risk factor for making bad decisions.

Simply reducing the prevalence of handguns across the board would lower the risks of handgun violence, by reducing the frequency with which a gun and bullets get together in the wrong hands.

It’s true that some people never load their guns, some others don’t shoot, or are shooting blanks, and still others couldn’t hit the broad side of the barn.

It is nonetheless clearly true that handguns kill people, in the relevant sense. Without the handguns, the combinations involving handguns would not occur. With many fewer handguns across the board, they’d occur much less often.

It’s therefore reasonable to try to get people to voluntarily give up their handguns, and to stop handing people handguns, that is, to stop being religious, and stop encouraging other people to be religious. Religion isn’t invariably bad for people, but on the whole, it’s a dangerous thing, and a bad thing often enough that we’re better off without it.

What are the alternatives for controlling the epidemic of bad religion? Should we regulate religion, not allowing untrained or immature people to handle dangerous ideas like souls and god? Should we ban especially dangerous ideas—-Biblical inerrantism, for example—-and enforce that ban somehow?

Should we allow people to be liberally and relatively benignly religious, but not allow them to take the Bible too seriously?

That doesn’t seem workable or desirable.

It seems better to strike at the biggest risk factor—-religion per se, and get people to voluntarily give it up, and stop spreading it.

That’s admittedly a bit of an awkward analogy, but I think there’s something basically right about it.

Failing to criticize relatively benign religion is what allows religion to seem normal, and irreligion to seem weird. In various indirect ways, it enables worse forms of religion.

What’s most basically wrong with fundamentalist and right-wing religion—-belief in souls, belief in God, and anti-Humanist ideas about divine morality—-is not speceific to obviously harmful religion like right wing fundamentalism. It’s there in most “liberal” religion, too.

I think we have to criticize religion across the board, because some of our best criticisms of “bad” religion—-that those central ideas are false—-apply to most “good” religion as well.

The underlying problem is that like guns, ideas central to almost all religion are in fact dangerous, even if sometimes they don’t manifest themselves in particularly harmful ways.

It’s therefore reasonable to think of religion in general as dangerous, and harmful overall, even though some variants of religion are, in those specific forms, relatively benign.

Arguably, we shouldn’t go out of our way to avoid criticizing relatively “benign” religion.

A benign religion is a lot like a benign tumor of the mind—-it’s still a tumor, and you just got lucky that it was benign.

Another point I was making—-unclearly, I admit—-is that religious people are not generally very committed to STRONGLY secular political principles, or respect for irreligius poeple like us.

So long as the overwhelming majority of people are religious, I think that will inevitably always be true.

Most people’s commitment to secularism is understandably limited. They’re just not very worried if the government endorses religion broadly, or endorses the domininant religion—-if it’s theirs—-if that doesn’t seem like a substantial threat to anything important.

The main argument for strict secularism like we’d like is a slippery slope argument—-that we should not go down the slope of endorsing religion at all, to avoid endorsing religion that will cause some significant harm to somebody. Most people who are religious don’t see the harm in going down that slope a little bit, or a moderate amount, so long as it’s not picking and choosing between Catholicism and Methodism or Lutheranism or (maybe) Judaism.

Look at what’s happening in the Minnesota (or was it Wisconsin) state legislature, with a Jewish state senator objecting to specifically Christian prayer. Why isn’t she objecting to state-sponsored prayer in general?

Partly because it’s not her ox getting gored. If there were as many out atheists as Jews, and they got as much respect and had as much clout, the argument would likely be different.

Until there are a lot of atheists, enough to have substantial clout, we will not have the kind of secularism we want, where the line is drawn above US on the slippery slope.

That’s how democratic politics generally works—-the more people you have in your group, the more voice your group has, and the easier it is to defend yourself and your principles.

The lack of strong commitment to strong secularism is NOT just a problem with “bad” religion like fundamentalism. It’s a problem with religion, including most liberal religion. Many liberal religionists don’t care much if our oxen get gored—-some will think it’s a good thing, because religion is good, and others will think it’s a bad thing, but not terrible, and it won’t change their votes.

It’s rather weird to say that we should be strongly in favor of separation of church and state, but not worried about whether people are liberally religious vs. irreligious. Liberally religious people are inevitably less committed to separation of church and state, on average, as long as they don’t see a threat to liberal religion. A threat to irreligion is just not a big problem for them.

Liberally religious people are also a problem in that they have difficulty defending themselves against conservative and illiberal religion.

For example, consider abortion rights and embryonic stem cell research. Abortion rights are perpetualy under threat not just because of conservative religion, but because liberal religion splits its vote, or doesn’t vote on that basis, for several reasons.

One reason is that most liberally religious people believe the same basic things as other religious people—-e.g., that a zygote has a human soul. Some are anti-choice and anti-embryonic stem cell research because of that, despite being liberal on most issues. (Even some New Agers are anti-choice, because they too think a microscopic dot of tissue has a precious human soul, and is actually a person in a relevant sense.)

Some other liberally religious people think that abortion should be legal, but is still bad, because an embryo has a soul, but not a whole soul, or god will take care of its soul if a woman decides to get an abortion, or something like that.

Those people are not generally strongly committed to abortion rights or stem cell research, for any of several reasons. One is that they may not be sure what they themselves think on the matter. Another is that they may be pretty sure for themselves, but people who disagree are reasonable too—-they’re not going to see a pro-lifer as an unreasonable extremist that they’d rather keep out of office.

In these and other ways, liberally religious people really are part of the problem. They’re confused and they’re compromised—-they can’t argue strongly against “bad” religion, because they share too many of the same premises.

Atheists make substantially better political allies for atheists than liberally religious people do, so all other things being equal, it IS a good thing to convince other people to be atheists.

I’m NOT saying that we should all become gnu atheist activists and devote all our energies to deconverting religious people—-far from it. I think there are a lot of different activities that do good in different ways, and that promoting irreligion IS a PART of that mix.

In the long run, it’s the only way to really get what we want. There are some good things that are just not going to happen until we are more numerous, and get some clout, and are visibly numerous, and don’t seem like marginal freaks anymore.

Ronald, do please look at my racism example. It’s true that most white people in the U.S. have at some level embraced the idea that racism is bad, but there is still a lot of more subtle racism (and even a non-negligible rate of more egregious racism) going on in the country despite all the stated good intentions of the “nice” white people. In a country like ours which has a significant and recognizable racial divide, and which recognizes “race” as a meaningful category into which humans may be sorted, that categorization is an inevitable source of conflict. Until we get to the point where someone’s skin color genuinely doesn’t mean *anything* of importance other than a mundane and very rough signification of the predominant origin of one’s most recent ancestors, racism is still going to be with us at some level and it is still going to cause problems.

But religion isn’t like race in the sense that it’s not even in principle possible that humans could ever see religion as being as meaningless as hair color and thus avoid fighting over it. The whole point of a religion is that that religion *means* something, and that meaning, and the fact that people have conflicting ways of assigning that meaning without any empirical way of distinguishing between them, is an inevitable source of conflict. I’m thinking along the lines of Hector Avalos’ _Fighting Words_ here—- religion creates artificial differences which are fundamentally irreconcilable. It’s the Sneetches with the stars on their bellies vs. the ones without, all over again.

In any case, I just discovered yesterday that Matt Dillahunty and Jeff Dee also have a wonderful discussion of our topic here on The Atheist Experience show from August 8 of last year. You can access the podcast of the show at this page:

It’s episode #672, and the relevant section starts at about 50 minutes in. I think it’s well worth a watch/listen—- they frame the subject in a way that I don’t think any of us here have quite attempted, and which I think it’s better for me to point you to than attempt to replicate. Enjoy!

Hm. I’d had the impression that Dr. Tyson was more of an accommodationist, but from that video it seems that he’s got a bit of that anti-theism fire in him too. I guess he’s just a little more choosy about the places in which he expresses it…

I watched the video and perhaps Dr. Tyson might have kept his message on track better by not mentioning the high percentage of Nobels having gone to Jews. Whether or not a particular Jew happens to be orthodox or secular such an ethnic background carries with it a high potential for having benefited from many generations within a culture which has historically prized early childhood development originating primarily with the importance of learning and reciting Torah as young children. This is definitively religion in practice.

As we now can appreciate, unfortunately the largest part of any given human’s brain development is already pretty well fixed before they even start showing up in grade school. Would multi-generational “iterations of literation” as in the case of such young Jews manage to ever become an evolutional factor, or are we to suppose the Nobel statistics represent something that is strictly cultural? Pure coincidence? In either case it would appear that the God of Abraham (“GOA”) has served the Jews (and thereby all of us) quite well considering what has ultimately been brought to the science table. “A blessing to all people, as they say.”

This much said and having mentioned the evolution of religions in my earlier post, I don’t see many Jews stoning people to death these days regardless of how many prescriptions for same are still listed in their ancient and mystical holy Torah. It’s important to know that what might have been acceptable in the past may no longer be and when it’s time to move onward from some of the old rules.

“Let him without sin cast the first stone” - as reportedly said by Jesus, being either 1/3 of the 3/1 God or a major prophet (who is in either case slated to return) under other GOA leanings which certainly doesn’t even begin represent the Jews. Yet some religious people falling within such a scope pride themselves in not having figured for any evolution of the GOA’s expectations and thereby lies the problem(s).

#61 val eisman (Guest) on Thursday April 21, 2011 at 12:29pm

@Gray1, You “don’t see many Jews stoning people to death” these days? LOL! They don’t need to in Israel. They have advanced weapons of mass destruction—they even use white phosphorous in their military operations in Muslim states like Lebanon and the Gaza Strip Cast Lead Operation.
Also, young Israeli boys in Israel stone those who don’t observe the Jewish Sabbath.

And Israel is becoming more of a theoist state every day. A group of rabbis is so intolerant and racist in Israel as to have tried to get a law passed allowing Jewish Landlords in Israel to discriminate against Palestinians.

Worse yet, they want Israeli Palestinians to take a pledge to a Jewish state.

So, ya think Jews don’t care about religion? The older Jews I know in this country are obssessed with Israel being a Jewish state.

It’s a shame to be sidetracked on the issue of Nobel Laureates being Jewish when it’s debatable how many of these scientists were religious and then to lose track of the broader point about how religion can hold back a civilizations scientific and general progress.

#63 Val Eisman (Guest) on Thursday April 21, 2011 at 2:52pm

@ Strngelove, what’s worse is to sit around blabbing about religion when everyone know’s it’s concentrated corporate power and lack of campaign finance reform making this country go to hell in a handbasket.

All this organization does is to sidetrack people from the main struggles of the hour.

Thank you Val Eisman. We should carefully watch for those young Israeli boys and properly punish them when they are caught throwing stones on the sabbath. So too with any group of rabble rousing hate mongering, so called rabbis when they show their long gray bearded, head banging pharisee faces in public. I didn’t claim that evolution was universal, “Neandertals are not totally extinct; they live on in some of us,” citing Neandertal Genome Yields Evidence Of Interbreeding With Humans ...

Some of the older U.S. Jews that you personally know are obsessed with Israel being Jewish? It should not surprise you that many U.S. Christian fundies are solidly in the pro-Israel, pro-Jewish state game because the End Time (which they are actually looking forward to) is slated to follow the rebuilding of the Jewish Third Temple.

Should we care whether others believe in god? How about those who are so vain as to actually be looking forward to the complete end of the world as we know it? To quote the good book: Amo 5:18 Woe unto you that desire the day of the LORD! to what end [is] it for you? the day of the LORD [is] darkness, and not light.

I did not phrase my previous post well at all. This is what I should have said: It seems that we are taking Tyson’s presentation and going off on a tangent about people of the Jewish faith or Israel. I don’t think that Tyson was saying anything what-so-ever about people of the Jewish faith. He was simply saying that there was a group of people from the same general region who happened to be Jewish (and he wasn’t meaning of the Jewish faith, he was referring to people of that cultural, ethnic group) who have had a stellar record in terms of their contribution to science. He was making the point that this might have been the case for the people of the region of Baghdad had they not been constrained by their religious beliefs. It is a shame that we’re using the mere mention of the Jews to go off on all these other tirades Frankly, I’m seeing the same sort of knee jerk reactionaryism and muddled thinking that I find among my religious and superstitious friends and it surprises me to see this among people that I would expect are Atheists, unless you are not…?

Oh, I thought the discussion was about if we should care whether people are religious, i.e. believe in god. Dr. Tyson seemed to be saying that a wrong turn in religious beliefs at least in the cited instance of the Muslims actually curtailed what once was some stellar (pun alert) advances in science. My point is that the religious beliefs of Jews has managed to advance various fields of science by paradigm shifts.

“religious beliefs of Jews has managed to advance various fields of science by paradigm shifts” ... that was your point? Because they may or may not have read the Torah as children? I think that connection, if it exists, and if it says anything about religion improving science, would take a great deal more exposition then simply stating it. I still think, if this was a comment on Tyson’s comments, that it is completely missing the point or an attempt to hijack his point based on very little merit.

Well, at least we can agree that something or someone is still missing the point, but admittedly I’m playing the devil’s advocate here (he says with an ironic chuckle while glorifying a perceived superior brain power of god’s chosen people). On another note I thought perhaps that my comment about the fundies who are backing Israel chiefly in hopes of initiating their prophesied end times event would garner more concern about that little matter. Such concerns must have moved on to greener pastures?

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Ron Lindsay is senior research fellow at the Center for Inquiry, having previously served as president and CEO from 2008 to 2016. Prior to joining CFI, he was in private legal practice in Washington, D.C. for twenty-six years. He received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Georgetown University and his J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law. Among other works, he is the author of Future Bioethics: Overcoming Taboos, Myths, and Dogmas (Prometheus 2008), the entry on “Euthanasia” for the International Encyclopedia of Ethics (Wiley Blackwell 2013), and The Necessity of Secularism: Why God Can’t Tell Us What To Do (Pitchstone Publishing 2014).